Caduceus
The Education Arcade and Boston-based Fablevision are collaborating on Caduceus, an online puzzle-adventure game for tweens. Caduceus exposes young players (ages 8 to 12) to the concepts of altruism and compassion, while also testing their skills of logic, reason and creativity.
Caduceus is a key content element of a new pediatric medical research awareness and fundraising movement called Generation Cures. Founded by Children’s Hospital Boston, the Generation Cures website offers creative online stories, games and interactive resources designed to help parents teach their children to care about others and believe they can make a difference. The site is currently in beta mode, and will be formally launched in New England in Q4 2008 and then nationally in 2009.
About Caduceus
Caduceus is named after the classic symbol for both medicine and alchemy. The game plays out as a series of thematically related puzzles that are linked by the story of a young healer’s journey across the fantastic world of Alterica, where a deadly and unknown disease has taken hold.
The Story
Though you have just graduated from the Alterican College of Alchemy, and are only a novice healer, you are sent into field to fight the disease that is ravaging the land, and soon you are tracking the spreading plague to its source. Decipher each mystery you face and your Caduceus—the magical staff carried by all healers— will transform. As you rise in rank, the staff will magically acquire the snakes, wings and sparkling jewel of the full Caduceus. Throughout your journey you will meet unforgettable characters, form alliances with other players and set your own course until you find the cure that will save Alterica.
The Game
The puzzles in Caduceus have the feel of casual games, but they also expose young players to real issues related to the science of medicine. In addition, the mechanics of the games are designed to encourage altruism and collaboration. Each player is a member of a cohort of players making comparable progress in the game. Though game-play is individual, the entire cohort must donate a percentage of their earned points before any member of the cohort can proceed to the next chapter of the game. As players complete each puzzle, they earn points which have a real-world value. Only after they and their fellow players donate some of those points to a worthy cause, however, will the next chapter of the story (and the next puzzle) be revealed.
Caduceus is currently being piloted through Generation Cures in select U.S. cities and online, and will be formally launched nationwide in 2009.
Phil
It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie: rogue black holes roaming our galaxy, threatening to swallow anything that gets too close. In fact, new calculations by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) suggest that hundreds of massive black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way.
Good news, however: Earth is safe. The closest rogue black hole should reside thousands of light-years away. Astronomers are eager to locate them, though, for the clues they will provide to the formation of the Milky Way.
"These black holes are relics of the Milky Way's past," said Loeb. "You could say that we are archaeologists studying those relics to learn about our galaxy's history and the formation history of black holes in the early universe."
According to theory, rogue black holes originally lurked at the centers of tiny, low-mass galaxies. Over billions of years, those dwarf galaxies smashed together to form full-sized galaxies like the Milky Way.
Each time two proto-galaxies with central black holes collided, their black holes merged to form a single, "relic" black hole. During the merger, directional emission of gravitational radiation would cause the black hole to recoil. A typical kick would send the black hole speeding outward fast enough to escape its host dwarf galaxy, but not fast enough to leave the galactic neighborhood completely. As a result, such black holes would still be around today in the outer reaches of the Milky Way halo.
Hundreds of rogue black holes should be traveling the Milky Way's outskirts, each containing the mass of 1,000 to 100,000 suns. They would be difficult to spot on their own because a black hole is visible only when it is swallowing, or accreting, matter.
One telltale sign could mark a rogue black hole: a surrounding cluster of stars yanked from the dwarf galaxy when the black hole escaped. Only the stars closest to the black hole would be tugged along, so the cluster would be very compact.
Due to the cluster's small size on the sky, appearing to be a single star, astronomers would have to look for more subtle clues to its existence and origin. For example, its spectrum would show that multiple stars were present, together producing broad spectral lines. The stars in the cluster would be moving rapidly, their paths influenced by the gravity of the black hole.
"The surrounding star cluster acts much like a lighthouse that pinpoints a dangerous reef," explained O'Leary. "Without the shining stars to guide our way, the black holes would be all but impossible to find."
The number of rogue black holes in our galaxy depends on how many of the proto-galactic building blocks contained black holes at their cores, and how those proto-galaxies merged to form the Milky Way. Finding and studying them will provide new clues about the history of our galaxy.
Locating the star cluster signposts may turn out to be relatively straightforward.
"Until now, astronomers were not searching for such a population of highly compact star clusters in the Milky Way's halo," said Loeb. "Now that we know what to expect, we can examine existing sky surveys for this new class of objects."
-Phil
Great focus
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I look forward to the day a
I look forward to the day a student can play a game and earn their high school diploma or better yet, network and receive a job after all through gaming!
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Caduceus is a great game for
Caduceus is a great game for kids. My sister plays this game all the time and it's teaching her very well. She's becoming very creative due to the style of the game.
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Very Neat
This is an excellent article about how this program works. It's goal is to improve younger minds to be brighter in their educational outreach much similair to goals of teaching in a high school diploma course. Even if one decides to test their high school academics in a video game, it wouldn't be too new of a concept considering that you apply a lot of what you learn when you play normal video games. It would be a new concept to earn online high school diploma by playing a game that could be accredited by a national accreditation body that is legitimate. We'll see. I enjoyed your article on this educational game very much. I look forward to the day a student can play a game and earn their high school diploma or better yet, network and receive a job after all through gaming!
with interesting new game
with interesting new game mechanics, and these games frequently beat out competition from large studios with long standing franchises. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the "game of the year" category, in which Portal, a short puzzle game in bedroom furniture which you use a personal wormhole generator to escape a prison-like lab, beat out favorites like Super Mario Galaxy and Rock Band.
Children are transported to
Children are transported to the mythical land of Alterica where they play an online adventure game filled with many puzzle games. Their quest is to find a cure for a deadly virus that is devastating the land. The kids are healers in this fantasy world and assume the roles of both a research scientist and a doctor. The games are logic and skill based and are a lot of fun. The graphics for the adventure game are phenomenal.
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